Today’s been tough. Emotions all over the show. I found myself envying the Queen her letting go of all of life’s struggles recently…
Yes, a tougher day today than of late.
But one thought runs like a lifeline through it.
“Come to the infinite dimension.”
From a dismal beginnings it’s become like spending a day with The Ancient One! (Ninja mystic monk-sorceress in Marvel’s Dr Strange.) Beaten up regularly but always restored. Life being ruthless, yet kind…
Experiencing the extremes of life after loss is bringing me all kinds of goodies, often in ways unexpected. In moments where grief overwhelms me, these fragments of goodness find me. They soothe me back into alignment.
A lesson I’ve learned recently from three squirrel kits brings steadiness to my yearning for joy.
Here’s how…
Picture the scene. A metal bird feeder — a tall pole, with a shallow basket 2/3 of the way up. A plastic, cylindrical seed dispenser, designed for small birds only, hangs from an arm at the top of the pole. The base of the dispenser is a good foot from the basket, roughly at the same height…
I’m sure you can imagine what comes next.
When faced with loss of any kind — loss of a loved one, loss of direction, loss of function or identity…
…We find ourselves in a world gone grey. A world without meaning, without sweetness, a world where problems are the only reality and we’re too worn down to face them.
If we have lost our power to imagine, we have nothing to bring to a landscape of loss. We’ve no hope of rainbows… or so we think.
“A rainbow is a prism that sends shards of multicoloured light in various directions. It lifts our spirits and makes us think of what is possible. Hope is the same — a personal rainbow of the mind.” Charles Richard Snyder
I think joy works likewise. I think joy is more accessible than we imagine, when facing the infinite grey… I think joy works like a prism of the mind.
Pristine focus is the prism. Align it with the light and a rainbow forms. Brilliant. Shimmering. Heavenly.
But the slightest misalignment and the rainbow is gone. As if it had never existed. And never will again.
The focus required is absolute.
Curled up on the couch I was. Crying again.
Lord, when will it all end?
The day had started well enough. A day without structure. A day just for me.
No events booked. No people to see. No pressure, no fuss, no muss…
I crave days like that, as life becomes busier. I love time to myself. To be free.
But, sure as mustard, my day took a nose-dive. It ditched me right into the sea. The ocean of misery swallowed me whole.
Again.
Seriously. Enough already. What’s with all this sobbing?
Maybe you’re grieving, as I am, the loss of your soulmate, your reason-to-be.
Perhaps you are struggling to find light to live by in times that seem unbearably sad.
Or you could just be noticing you’ve not smiled so much lately, your forehead creased into slight frowning...
Whatever ‘amok’ your mind may be running, I hope the following helps — my journaled reflections as I took on the perils of my puppy-dog mind.
No clinging to flotsam to stay afloat on the ocean. It’s all going under eventually…
A shipwreck in a ruthless storm, that’s a pretty good metaphor for my early experience following the death of my soulmate.
I was going to say a ‘killer’ storm, but this storm doesn’t show that much mercy.
I don’t die. Much though (at times) I’d like to. The ocean buffets me around like an orca tossing a seal it has no hunger for — I’m grief’s plaything, a cruel amusement…
“I cannot think too much; I dare not think too deeply, or else I will be defeated, not merely by pain but by a drowning nihilism, a cycle of thinking there’s no point, what’s the point, there’s no point to anything.” — Chimamanda Ngazi Adichie
Grief is oft described as being adrift in stormy waters. Those waves of emotion hammering us; holding us under; sucking air from our lungs; pounding our limbs. Coiling us round in their primal roiling. There’s no sense of the surface, when you’re the toy of the undertow…
But for me, that’s not the whole story.
I was sitting at my sister’s kitchen table while she made a work call from her office. I’d had the most wonderful three days with her and her lovely husband. Three days without a wobble. Not a moment of sadness. Ne’er a twinge of worry. Wall to wall sunshine, inside and out. What a delight!
I’d lost sight of my puppy-dog mind for a while. Clearly, it had enjoyed the break too. Lots of happy distraction from the soothing of sweet company.
Now, however, we were headed home, my puppy-dog mind and I. And as I sat at that kitchen table, my inner mischief-maker found itself a toilet roll to shred…
No wonder we feel so stuck!
There’s a time for acknowledging current reality, for sure. But what happens when we focus on a reality we don’t like and don’t know how to resolve?
Every system in our world is geared towards magnifying the problem.
We obsess over it.
We tell and retell the story of it.
It becomes all-consuming in our efforts to resolve it.
We’re scolded if we don’t ‘face reality’. We’re branded ‘Pollyanna’ with eye-rolling and exasperation if we dare to defy the advice of those rooted in problem-focused thinking.
The problem soon becomes huge in our experience. Our power diminishes as we try taking action to fix the ugly issue, or distance ourselves from it — the thorn in our side.
How often do we act and fail, only to set ourselves up for more of the same misery, or worse?
Or perhaps we become utterly hopeless like dogs so repeatedly punished that they no longer attempt to leave their cage, even when the door is left wide open…
And then, after a life time of disempowerment, of ‘knowing’ our innate futility, loss finds us, in some major form. Loss of a loved one, loss of health or wealth, loss of direction, loss of anima.
We find ourselves in a world gone grey. A world without meaning, without sweetness, a world where problems are the only reality and we’re too worn down to face them.
If we have lost our power to imagine, we have nothing to bring to a landscape of loss.
You Cannot Prevent Birds of Sorrow From Flying Overhead — But You Can Stop Them Making Nests in Your Hair
What a wonderful Chinese proverb!
Nesting sorrow birds. Hmm. Yes, I’d say the last few days have been rather too permissive of nest-building for my sad flock. But how to send them kindly on their way? Therein lies the rub…
The rub comes from wanting to send them on their way. And who doesn’t want to send sadness packing? It’s instinctual. We want to shoo misery away.
Unfortunately, in a vibrational universe, that desire backfires on us, BIG time. Attention, laser-like, paints a target by its frequency. The painted target attracts more of the same…